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PSAT National Merit Scholar Qualifying Scores for 2020, by State

Update December 10, 2019. Note: Students who received their PSAT results in December 2018 are the NMS Class of 2020. Their qualifying selection index scores are listed below, per the Compassprep website. For students who took the test in October 2019 (NMS Class of 2021), selection index scores will not be available until September 2020.

The selection index score is the sum of your three PSAT scores, maximum of 228. The first score listed is for 2020; the second was the score required for the class of 2019; and the third is the score for the class of 2018.

To qualify for a National Merit Scholarship, the PSAT must be taken in the student’s junior year of high school. Many parents may not be aware that there is no single nationwide score on the PSAT that will qualify a student to become a NMS semifinalist, a critical preliminary step on the way to becoming a finalist and then perhaps a merit scholar.

Students are classified according to the state in which they attend high school, not the state of actual residence.

Semifinalists emerge from the top 3-4% of students (50,000 or so) taking the test, by virtue of the PSAT score alone. The top 3-4% of students earn “commended” status, and there is a national uniform score for commended students=209 for 2017. (See below for SAT equivalent.) Semifinalists, on the other hand, account for fewer than 1% of all students, or about 16,000 nationwide.

From these students, the merit scholar foundation, using state allocation levels, selects about 15,000 to become finalists; and from this group, about 9,000 are actually selected as merit scholars, based on both PSAT and SAT scores and a letter of recommendation from the high school principal. Therefore, many students who meet the semifinalist thresholds listed below do not go on to become finalists or merit scholars (two different things, though for some schools being a finalist is sufficient to earn support). We speculate that meaningful improvement on the SAT, taken in the spring of the junior year, relative to the PSAT score from the preceding October, may help in identifying students who go beyond finalist status and become merit scholars.

Each state has its own threshold PSAT score, which is the baseline for students to be considered as semifinalists in a given state. The scores vary widely for the NMS classof 2020, from 2012 in West Virginia to 223 in New Jersey.